The way Homeboy DC (who I must note immediately is not a “black” person) tells it rings true to anyone who’s been wrung out in this town for more than a day or two. Three years ago cops stopped him on a DUI, took him to the station, where he…
A girl’s voice, tentative, uncertain, not too sure of her place in the thick of things. She knows where she wants to be, she’s just unaware how best to get there. Something’s off. The scene: a nightclub door in Everycity, U.S.A. Madness and confusion, the hip and the clueless come…
A sinister baritone, moaning some Gregorian-like chant, oozes from the woofers like so much blood from a sacrificial lamb. Doubling, tripling, and further multiplying the chant creates a multi-harmony, placing the listener in a demented medieval cathedral stalked by a crazed, undead vocalist. Holy Smoke, the latest creation of so-called…
It must be nice to be able to kick back, relax, and recount glorious and memorable moments from a world-circling, who’s-who-filling, three-decade-long spin around popular music’s inner circles. So Master Henry Gibson does. That screamy noise on Donny Hathaway’s “The Ghetto,” that was little baby Lalah Hathaway…Curtis Mayfield is hanging…
It’s 3:00 a.m., one of those all-too-infamous Saturday nights at the late Boomerang, and the dance floor is jammed with sweaty, jostling, grinning, working bodies. The pitch: fever. Not a soul in the house is standing still. And then at once, just like that, the music stops. A collective gasp,…
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. — Tom Stoppard It was one of those tragic cliches you’d hope would never come true, the stuff of which movies are made. And were it to come true, you’d never imagine it happening so close to home,…
Just like every other species that has survived through natural selection, so has the collector of jazz recordings. Contemporary observers claim to have spotted prototypes of this creature as far back as the early Twenties, when King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, and Bix Beiderbecke first began…
You’ve got to hand it to the Japanese. I can remember when their idea of special-effects wizardry was two guys in lizard costumes throwing each other around a scale-model set of Tokyo that was rendered with all the accuracy and attention to detail of the plastic hotels from a Monopoly…
Even when he’s completely out of it, as he so often seems to be, Bob Dylan has a knack for putting together seemingly meaningless words and somehow stumbling onto profundity. Dylan has done as much for, or at least to, the language as any other songwriter. Local singer-guitarist Peter Betan…
Those were great and scurrilous times. Picture it: A roomful of upright, high-level journalists, circa 1985. Some are suffering oxygen deprivation to the brain from wearing ties (a malady common to newspapermen). Each is an individual, but all are locked in the ivory-tower, black-and-white mentality typical of newsroom employees at…
When Bob Marley died in 1981 at the age of 36, he was mourned by the millions for whom he had been a musical and political messiah. Revolutionary both in style and in lyrical content, Marley’s songs were an accurate reflection of the man: defiant, idiosyncratic, perceptive, and infectious. Marley…
To those born within the past 30 years or so it must come as a stunning shock to learn that rock did not always rule the land, much less demand consideration as a viable force in the world of entertainment. But once this white-dominated exploitation of black R&B did take…
While the thought of actually listening to a real jazz band doing what it does best might seem to be the biggest drag imaginable to the majority of today’s music consumers, it is the very lifeblood of others. We read the general press, the trade journals, the yuppie and buppie…
It’s a long, long way from East Orange, New Jersey, to Ocean Drive, and Jacquim, “The Wicked Buddha,” never lets the illusion faze him. Sure there’s the standard parade of girls (“lust college – twelve o’clock”), and the sun has a tendency to make everything glimmer, but the mood and…
The sight of a drunkard is a better sermon against that vice than the best that was ever preached on the subject. — John Faucit Saville I got a letter the other day from a musician I haven’t seen in months, a pretty fair guitar player who used to be…
Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain graces the cover of the April 16 issue of Rolling Stone, in his carefully frayed jeans and his way-cool shades and his oh-so-defiant “CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK” T-shirt, desperately trying not to look like a millionaire rock star with a babe-o-rama trophy wife. Cobain is this year’s…
The results of the latest incredibly scientific New Times poll are in. In case you were among the quarter of a billion or so U.S. citizens we somehow failed to contact, the burning issue was this: Which version of Elvis should the post office put on the stamp? The landslide…
Hear that thunder? The concussive ricochet of stick on skin, mortar-fire drum licks kicking this most compelling song along, then lightning guitars flashing and crashing, and a perfect rock and roll voice roaring, “Out on the streets your chances are zero.” You’re never out of danger here, and the only…
The wanna-be rock star basking in the spotlight at Washington Square or Cactus Cantina or Churchill’s Hideaway might get up the next morning to deliver pizza, handle retail customers at a record store, go to school, or program computers. (Those four occupations seem most common among local musicians with day…
The soft glow of innocence in a child’s face. The meeting of two souls who will become one through love. The all-consuming pride of parenthood. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of the trend in music that scoffs, mocks, and berates such sweet and pure notions. There is goodness in this…
Many have tried, most have failed, but I tell you there are some new bands, not new at all really, doing everything musically possible to make geezers like me feel young again. Maybe due to their rejuvenating powers, or perhaps because they’re simply great bands, these acts are hot fodder…
All music is local to somewhere. Here at New Times Music Central, we’ve always believed, and tried to express, that music should be judged by its merits, not its geographic point of origin. The recordings reviewed below are examined using the same criteria we’d use for any other release, be…
